April 17th – The end of the road, for now….
We left Barstow with our sights on the final prize, the Santa Monica Pier and the official end of the Route 66. We started our day with so much excitement and anticipation; we were on our way to the final stop. Unfortunately, once we got close to LA that all went out the window. The traffic was horrendous! How do people live here, or should I say, how do people drive here! It was crazy, bumper to bumper and tons of idiots, but we did our best to keep our eye on the prize and muddled through. Driving alongside downtown LA and seeing the iconic buildings was nice and if you ever watched any TV you would recognize many of them including the Los Angeles city hall building although it was quite a way away you could still pick it out. We were on “the 10”, if you’re in southern California that’s how they refer to interstate highways, don’t ask me why. At home, we don’t call it, “the 95”, or “the 91” or “the 8”, but that’s what they say, so that’s what I was calling them. I was also able to click a distance picture of the Hollywood soon, which was nice. Honestly, I don’t have any desire to drive anywhere near the downtown Los Angeles area, nor near Hollywood, this was close enough for me.
We finally arrived in Santa Monica and completely lucked out as we found a parking space steps from the pier. If you have never been, which we have not, the Santa Monica pier is like a large amusement park on top of a concrete pier. The Santa Monica Pier was the first concrete pier on the West Coast and was built in 1909. The pier was full of activity, lots of food vendors, amusement rides, vendors selling everything, street performers, beach goers, an occasional homeless person screaming at everyone (hey it’s California after all), and what we were here for, the marker for the end of Route 66! The weather that day was picture perfect, sunny, blue skies, light wind. As we walked up to it, I could swear I saw a light shining down on it from above 😉. It may sound corny to some, but this was a big moment for us, we had just driven 3,369 miles, across 12 different states, in 14 days and we were so excited to take that photo in front of the sign. We stayed on the pier for a while to take it all in, we reflected on the trip out, we both agreed it felt like we were on the road for a month. We talked about how beautiful our country is, and how fortunate we are to be able to travel around and see it. We were also kind of sad that that part was over, but agreed we had so much more to do and see and it was time to hit the road. Before we left, we grabbed a couple of smash burgers, bought a few things and took many photos. Now it was time to depart and get back on “the 10” and continue to our next stop, Twenty-Nine Palms.
The trip to Twenty-Nine Palms should have taken about 2 hours and 45 minutes, give or take. But let’s go back to my comment about the horrendous traffic in the LA area, it was even worse. It took us about 5 hours to get to our hotel, and we would learn later that Coachella was going over the weekend 😡 that’s all I have to say about that!
We finally reached our hotel about 5pm and we were happy to have a nice quiet spot to chill out for the next couple of days.
We have lots more to do, but this weekend is all about relaxing. More to come.
See you down the road.
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